Always at this time of the year something changes in Johannesburg. The mood lifts. The end of the year with its long holiday, road trips through the Karoo and along the coast, is coming soon. The storms are coming too. The rains will clean the Joburg air, cool us down and green our city. In a week or so, our streets will be lined with purple jacaranda flowers.

I came to work this morning feeling better, happier and very settled.

And then I read this in the New York Times (nothing new, just depressing when things do feel better):

The past year (in South Africa) has been especially unnerving, with one bleak event after another, and it is more than acidic politics that have soured the national mood. Economic growth slowed; prices shot up. Xenophobic riots broke out in several cities, with mobs killing dozens of impoverished foreigners and chasing thousands more from their tumbledown homes.

The country’s power company unfathomably ran out of electricity and rationed supply. Gone was the conceit that South Africa was the one place on the continent immune to such incompetence. The rich purchased generators; the poor muddled through with kerosene and paraffin.

Other grievances were ruefully familiar. South Africa has one of the worst crime rates. But more alarming than the quantity of lawbreaking is the cruelty. Robberies are often accompanied by appalling violence, and people here one-up each other with tales of scalding and shooting and slicing and garroting…

The onslaught of unsettling news has proved too much for some with the means to flee. No reliable numbers are kept on emigration, but “packing for Perth” — a phrase used to describe white flight, not necessarily to the Australian city — is believed to be on the increase.

Since 1996, the black population has risen to a projected 38.5 million from 31.8 million, according to government statistics. The white population has dropped to a projected 4.5 million from 4.8 million.

John Loos, an economist at First National Bank of South Africa, who tracks the reasons given by people who sell homes in white suburban markets, said 9 percent cited emigration in the last quarter of 2007. In the first quarter of 2008, the number rose to 12 percent; in the second quarter it reached 18 percent.

Minority groups — which include whites, Asians and people of mixed race — “are prone to overreacting about anything,” Mr. Loos said. “We have people with the mind-set that this country is just another Zimbabwe in the making.”

But, not all is doom and gloom. Barry Bearak, the writer, quotes Louis Fourie, a noted financial adviser who travels the country delivering a speech called “South Africa, How Are You?”

Mr. Fourie reminds people that the country has 1,533 miles of gorgeous coastline, 10 international airports, a robust stock exchange and an open society with a free press. He fondly repeats the phrase that South Africa is “the most unsung success story in modern history.”

Related posts:

1. Is the controversial Glenn Beck still in Cape Town? Last Friday in the Jewish Report I saw an ad...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.